A mobile phone stores contacts in the phone itself and/or on the SIM. Over the years, the phone book on my SIM became cluttered with duplicate entries, inconsistently-named contacts, and so on. I decided recently to tidy up the phone book, and looked for a way to do it from Linux.

Now, the last time I tidied up my phone book was back in 2003 when my SIM was in a Sony Ericsson T68i. These days I’m using the same SIM in an Android smartphone: the HTC Desire. Back then I used a shareware application called Mobile Navigator on a laptop running Windows XP. So, naturally, I thought it would be possible to do something similar from a PC running Linux.

An indirect method of editing a phone book in an Android phone is recommended in many Web forums. The advice is to synchronise the phone’s phone book with GMail on your PC, edit the contacts in GMail on the PC and then the contacts will be updated in the phone when the phone next synchronises with GMail. That is all very well, but I don’t want to import my phone contacts into GMail and thus have them stored in ‘The Cloud’, plus I don’t see why I should be forced to do that just to make it easier for me to tidy a phone book in my phone. So I set about searching for an application to do the job.

My search turned up three applications that appeared to enable a user to edit the phone book (phone and SIM):

3. MyPhoneExplorer (Version 1.8.1), closed-source ‘donationware’ for Windows, recommended in various forums and that has been used with WINE in Linux. Not only does MyPhoneExplorer allow you to edit the phone book, it also provides a host of other features such as: viewing the phone’s call logs, messages, hardware status, files and applications; sending messages via the PC; etc. It’s a nifty application.

The price for MOBILedit! is not extortionate but I wanted to find a cost-free solution if possible, and, more importantly, I could find no evidence on the Web of MOBILedit! having been used with WINE in Linux to edit the phone books in the HTC Desire.

The MyPhoneExplorer forums include a thread on using it with WINE, so MyPhoneExplorer looked like my only option (although it is a pity it is not FOSS). I installed MyPhoneExplorer with its own WINEPREFIX but, despite following the instructions in the MyPhoneExplorer forums, I was unable to get MyPhoneExplorer to connect to the HTC Desire via a USB cable in Linux. This may be because, despite what I have read on the android developers Web site (see Using Hardware Devices and OEM USB Drivers), as is the case with Windows it is necessary in Linux to install ADB USB drivers (the ADB drivers can be installed in Linux by installing the Android SDK). However, I was able to connect MyPhoneExplorer to my HTC Desire via WiFi at home (but not in a hotel, as connection depends on the router and internal network IP address space), and via Bluetooth (anywhere).

How to install MyPhoneExplorer in WINE

1. Use the Android Market to install MyPhoneExplorer Client on the phone.

5. Bind a virtual serial device to the phone (You can look up the phone’s Bluetooth MAC address in the phone itself to double check):

$ sudo rfcomm bind 1 11:22:33:AA:BB:C1 17

N.B. If you have been tinkering already with binding, and the virtual device /dev/rfcomm1 is therefore already bound, you will get an error message saying “Can't create device: Address already in use“. You can release the virtual device by using the command:

$ sudo rfcomm release /dev/rfcomm1

6. Create a symbolic link for the virtual serial link:

$ export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-myphoneexplorer
$ sudo ln -is /dev/rfcomm1 ${WINEPREFIX}/dosdevices/com2
$ sudo chmod 777 ${WINEPREFIX}/dosdevices/com2 # you may not need to do this, as the permissions may already be 777.

8. Select ‘Connection’ in the left pane and then select ‘Phone type’ to be ‘SonyEricsson phone with modeminterface’. Tick ‘Stable connection (some features are deactivated)’.

9. Select ‘Connection’ in the left pane and then select ‘Phone type’ to be ‘Phone with Google Android-OS’.

10. Select ‘Connection’ in the left pane and then select ‘Connect via…’ to be ‘Bluetooth’ and enter “COM2″ (upper case, and without the quotes) and click on ‘OK’.

11. Press F1 (or select File > Connect) and your PC should be able to connect to the phone and synchronise with your phone’s phone book (Extras > Start Multi-sync), thus enabling you to edit the contents and re-synchronise to update the phone book in the phone.

Script to make subsequent connections via Bluetooth easier

Note that the channel used by MyPhoneExplorer Client will change the next time you want to connect, so there is no point editing /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf (the Linux configuration file in which you would normally specify the channel). Therefore, to make life a little easier, I wrote a simple Bash script to automate as much as possible the process of reconnecting via Bluetooth in future. If you want to do the same, use your favourite text editor and save the following script with the file name myphoneexplorer.sh:

4. Select ‘Connection’ in the left pane and then select ‘Phone type’ to be ‘SonyEricsson phone with modeminterface’. Tick ‘Stable connection (some features are deactivated)’.

5. Select ‘Connection’ in the left pane and then select ‘Phone type’ to be ‘Phone with Google Android-OS’.

6. Select ‘Connection’ in the left pane and then select ‘Connect via…’ to be ‘WiFi’ and click on ‘OK’.

7. Press F1 (or select File > Connect) and your PC should be able to connect to the phone and synchronise with your phone’s phone book (Extras > Start Multi-sync), thus enabling you to edit the contents and re-synchronise to update the phone book in the phone.

The only limitation I have found using MyPhoneExplorer 1.8.1 in WINE is that it crashes if I try to cut and paste when editing a phone book entry. Additionally, some people have reported that the buttons on the button bar do not work when you are connected to the phone; they usually do work for me (apparently it depends on whether you have installed msxml3) but sometimes don’t. In any case, if they don’t then you can use the pull-down menus from the menu bar instead.

Other than that, MyPhoneExplorer works well in WINE and enables me to edit the phone book in my Android phone without involving Big Brother! It’s a nice application.

Firewall rules if using WiFi

If you’re using MyPhoneExplorer to connect with the phone via WiFi instead of Bluetooth, and your PC has a firewall enabled, according to a post on 7 June 2011 in the MyPhoneExplorer forums you have to configure the firewall with the following rules:

Alternatively you could just disable the firewall on your PC while you’re using MyPhoneExplorer with your phone, which I do anyway when I’m at home as my home network is protected by the firewall in my router.

On the 42nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, I look at a couple of ways that the FOSS application Audacity has been used to study that amazing event, and marvel at the sheer audacity (pardon the pun) of the Apollo programme.

Some of you may remember the 2006 audio analysis of Neil Armstrong’s famous words as he stepped onto the Lunar surface for the first time on 21 July 1969, 42 years ago tomorrow (the Lunar module landed on the 20 July). The analysis, which supposedly proved that Armstrong did say “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”, was performed using the Windows application GoldWave. You can read the following BBC article about the analysis: Armstrong ‘got Moon quote right’.

But Linux users can analyse the recording for themselves using, for example, Audacity. You might want to do it to celebrate the 42nd anniversary of that momentous occasion. You can download an MP3 file (a11a1091545-1101226.mp3) of the recording from the following NASA Web page: One Small Step.

If you haven’t already got Audacity installed, you can install it using your Linux distribution’s package manager.

In KDE, an Audacity icon subtitled Sound Editor will be installed under Kickoff > Applications > Multimedia. So launch Audacity, click on File > Open and open the MP3 file you downloaded from the NASA Web site. It’s quite a large file, so it will take a little while to load into Audacity. You can click on the Play button to listen to the whole file — which I recommend you do as it’s simply awe inspiring — but then you can zoom in on those famous words (notice the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons in the top right corner, and the scroll left and right buttons at the bottom of the Audacity window?). If you want to select only the relevant section, then you can enter the Selection Start as 00 h 08 m 38.000 s and the Selection End as 00 h 08 m 46.500 s. Then when you click on the Play and Stop buttons Audacity will play only that section. Or perhaps you prefer to hear just “That’s one small step for (a) man”, in which case set the Selection End as 00 h 08 m 41.100 s. Notice the smaller Play-at-speed button and speed slider about mid-way across the top of the Audacity control panel? You can even slow down the playback speed if you want. Try it. Now zoom in to the range 08 m 39.750 s to 08 m 40.000 s.

Well, the NASA Web page I referred to above states:

At the time of the mission, the world heard Neil say “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind”. As Andrew Chaikin details in A Man on the Moon, after the mission, Neil said that he had intended to say ‘one small step for a man’ and believed that he had done so. However, he also agreed that the ‘a’ didn’t seem to be audible in the recordings. The important point is that the world had no problem understanding his meaning. However, over the decades, people interested in details of the mission – including your editor – have listened repeatedly to the recordings, without hearing any convincing evidence of the ‘a’. In 2006, with a great deal of attendant media attention, journalist/ entrepreneur Peter Shann Ford claimed to have located the ‘a’ in the waveform of Neil’s transmission. Subsequently, more rigorous analyses of the transmission were undertaken by a number of people, including some with professional experience with audio waveforms and, most importantly, audio spectrograms. As of October 2006, none of these analyses support Ford’s conclusion. The transcription used above honors Neil’s intent.

Also, I was fascinated to read about the Italian high school class that used Audacity to analyse the time delay between Mission Control’s and Armstrong’s replies — you can hear the delays in the MP3 file — and calculated accurately the distance between the Earth and the Moon: Echoes from the Moon. Now that is one science class those school students won’t forget. What a fantastic idea by the school teacher.

A wonderful demonstration of the laws of physics, albeit not on the Apollo 11 mission, was performed on the Moon by the Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott: he dropped a hammer and a feather simultaneously. For those of you who aren’t engineers or scientists, or who don’t remember your school physics classes, take a look at practice proving theory correct in a fun way: The Apollo 15 Hammer-Feather Drop.

Did you know that more than 300,000 people worked on the Apollo programme, and it cost between 20 and 25 billion US dollars (1969 US dollars, which would be much more today taking into account inflation between 1969 and 2011)? It also cost several lives.

As I look up at the Moon in awe, and recall watching on a black-and-white TV set in 1969 as Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the Eagle, I think the Apollo programme was one of Mankind’s most amazing technological achievements, and perhaps the most amazing of them all. To think that the Lunar Module was controlled by a computer with far less processing power and memory than the smartphone that I hold in my hand today is astounding. No wonder the Apollo astronauts came back to Earth changed men. After their mission, everything else must have paled into insignificance.

This article is a refreshed version of a post I made in 2009 Sabayon Linux Forums on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. I used Audacity again recently, this time to reduce the loudness of an event sound for Mozilla Thunderbird, and I thought it would be nice to celebrate again both the Apollo 11 landing and the usefulness of Audacity and the fun that can be had with it.

One type of legacy .wmv file uses the ‘Windows Media Video 9 Screen’ MSS2 codec (“DMO-based codec, optimized for low-bitrate sequential screen captures or screencasts”, according to Wikipedia). Now, it is not possible to use win32codecs with the 64-bit versions of Linux multimedia players, so they cannot play .wmv files that use the MSS2 codec. However, there is a way around this: use the Windows version of SMPlayer in WINE. Below I explain the procedure I used to enable me to play .wmv files that use the MSS2 codec.

1. I surfed over to the download page of the MPlayer Web site and downloaded to ~/Desktop/ the installer for the latest version of SMPlayer for Windows (smplayer-0.6.9-win32.exe at the time of writing).

Instead it was easier for me to edit the Desktop Configuration File that was created on the Desktop, and also edit the menu entry that was created in the Kickoff menu, to execute the above command for me. Now all I need to do to launch SMPlayer for Windows is either to select it from Kickoff > Applications > Wine > Programs > SMPlayer > SMPlayer or to double-cick on the SMPlayer for Windows icon on my Desktop.

EDIT (December 11, 2012): OK, for those of you having trouble seeing the video component and only hearing the audio component of a .wmv file using MSS2, you need to do the following:

When you launch the SMPlayer 0.6.9 Setup program (wine smplayer-0.6.9-win32.exe) and click on Next and accept the Licence Agreement, make sure Binary Codecs (under MPlayer Components) is ticked.

When you launch SMPlayer for Windows and open the .wmv file, click on Options > Preferences to open the Preferences window. Click on General in the left pane, then click on the Video tab in the main pane and select “directx (fast)” or “directx(slow)” as the Output driver. I have just done this again (I’m currently using WINE 1.5.18) and I’m watching a MSS2-encoded .wmv file ‘Kai_Software2.wmv‘ as I type this, as shown in the information listed by SMPlayer for Windows: